19. Gavin
GAVIN
I’ve spent most of my life controlling narratives. Make it clean. Make it sharp. Make it disappear.
But tonight? Tonight, I let it unravel. No regrets.
Vanessa went down like the universe handed Parker a gift-wrapped opportunity, and she didn’t blink. Execution. Delivery. She tripped Vanessa like she was born to do it. Then she handled it like a pro. Kneeling beside her. Brushing her hair back. Asking if she was okay while smiling like an angel.
Helping her into the fucking ambulance.
The press was still hovering around the courtyard, and there she was—elegant, gracious, perfect. A vision in composed green satin, steady hands holding a woman who’d just threatened to ruin her life.
It was PR brilliance. And not even mine.
Now the gala’s over.
The crowds are almost gone, just stragglers lingering in the parking lot. The performers are packing up stilts and costumes. Catering staff are scraping trays, folding linens. The illusion has ended, and we’re left with the aftermath.
I’m standing near the stage, tie loose, collar unbuttoned, watching a fire breather haul his gear out through the side entrance. His hands are blackened with soot. His skin gleams with sweat under the industrial lights.
Not a bad metaphor for the company right now. Dirty hands behind closed doors.
Jack walks by, muttering something to the event manager. Harrison stands near one of the cocktail tables, surveying what’s left. Parker is in a far corner, thanking the janitorial crew like she’s one of them, not the reason half of LA just wrote five-figure checks.
I roll my neck, try to shake the tension out. But it doesn’t leave. Because while I should be focused on the fact that the gala was an overwhelming success, all I can think about is secrecy.
Not the baby. Not the idea of children. I can handle that, if it comes to it.
But the secrecy? The fact that none of us knew until she couldn’t hold it anymore? That eats at me.
Not because I needed to be first to know—but because people like us don’t get to have secrets. Not for long. Not without consequences. And this one? This secret has claws.
I walk toward Parker slowly, catching her as she finishes thanking a tired-looking barback who bows slightly before scurrying away with a silver tray of used glassware.
“Hey,” I say quietly.
She turns. Her smile’s faded now, replaced with something raw around the edges. “Hey.”
“You did good.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Good?”
I smirk. “You walked into the night as a scandal and left as a myth.”
She huffs. “Yeah, well…that wasn’t exactly the plan.”
“You improvised.”
“I panicked.”
“Same thing, if it works.”
She doesn’t laugh. Just exhales and looks around. “I keep thinking she’s going to sue me,” she murmurs. “Or press charges. Or show up on TikTok tomorrow with a broken tooth and a sob story.”
“She won’t.”
“She might.”
I shake my head. I know Vanessa too well for all that.
“She’d have to admit what she was doing in that room.
Admit she was spying. Illegally recording us.
She’d have to explain why she didn’t press charges immediately, and why half the people in this building watched you ‘help’ her off the floor after she ‘tripped.’”
Her lips twitch. “So that’s what we’re going with?”
“Legally, morally, emotionally, and literally? She tripped.”
Parker presses her hands to her face. “Jesus. If I were smarter, I wouldn’t have done it,” she says. “I knew I shouldn’t. The moment I moved. But I had this second—this one second—where I saw her face and thought, I can’t let her leave. So, I didn’t.”
“You calculated it.”
“I did.”
“And you helped her because?—?”
“Optics,” she says. “If she wanted to turn it into a sob story, I wanted an audience to see me do the right thing. A little theater goes a long way.”
Nothing could stop the pride from making me smile. “You’re terrifying.”
“Only a little.”
“You sure you’re not the one running this company?”
Her little smirk sends me. “Maybe just tonight.”
We find a quiet spot on the edge of the main ballroom—what’s left of it.
Half the tables have been broken down. The centerpieces are being wheeled out two at a time.
Staff move around us like polite ghosts, pretending not to overhear the cleanup crew of one of the city’s most scandalous PR firms decompressing after a night that shouldn’t have worked but did.
Parker takes a seat on the edge of the dais where the swing quartet had been earlier. Her shoes are off, heels tucked under one arm. Her hair’s come loose in a few places, and her lipstick’s mostly gone. She looks better now than she did at the start of the night. Like herself.
I sit beside her.
“You really think she won’t come after us?” she asks.
“Legally? No. She’s not stupid.”
“But she’s vindictive.”
“She’ll lick her wounds. Try to reinsert herself in the market. She’ll spin it however she can.”
Parker winces. “Vivian.”
“She’ll gloat. Quietly. Pretend she had nothing to do with Vanessa being at the gala. Claim she warned me, that I didn’t listen.”
“Is it true?”
“That she warned me?”
“That you didn’t listen.”
I smile faintly. “I listened. I just didn’t obey .”
Her eyes narrow. “Do you always phrase it like that?”
“Only when I want to sound interesting.”
Jack arrives with a bottle of water and two fresh towels from somewhere. He hands Parker one and drops the other over the back of his neck like he just walked out of a gym instead of a five-star event.
“She still on the property?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “She left with the ambulance.”
Jack grunts. “Good.”
Harrison joins us next. He’s on his phone, still reading something, a deep frown lining his brow.
“You good?” I ask him.
“Getting there.”
Parker glances at him. “You look tense.”
“I’m always tense.”
“You’re brooding.”
“Also true.” He puts the phone away, finally, and leans against a column across from us. His eyes go to Parker, and there’s something softer behind the usual steel. “You okay?”
She nods.
“You did great.”
Parker shrugs. “I just…didn’t want her to win.”
“She didn’t.”
“And if she tries again?”
Jack leans forward, elbows on knees. “Then we remind her why it didn’t work the first time.”
There’s a quiet that settles between us then.
Not uncomfortable. Just thick. Like the adrenaline hasn’t worn off yet but the crash is coming.
I don’t usually crash. But tonight, I feel close.
Too close. So I speak. To keep myself from thinking too hard.
“Honestly?” I say, “I’ve never been more relieved to watch a disaster unfold. ”
Jack glances at me. “You were smiling when she hit the floor.”
“I was. Just a little.”
“She looked like a pelican falling out of a tree,” Parker mutters.
Harrison snorts.
“Icon PR’s new slogan,” Jack says. “‘Graceful as falling teeth.’”
We laugh. All of us. It’s short and sharp and necessary. But the moment doesn’t last long. Because Harrison’s face shifts. Subtle. But I see it. Like a shadow passes behind his eyes.
He straightens. Reaches into his jacket. Pulls out his phone again. And I know something’s coming. Something heavier than Vanessa. Harrison’s thumb moves across the screen like he’s skimming something for the fifth time just to be sure. His jaw’s tight. His shoulders tense.
That alone tells me more than I want to know. “What is it?”
He doesn’t look up. “Give me a second.”
Jack stands. “You’ve had hours.”
“Yeah, well, I wanted to be certain before I opened my mouth.”
Parker watches him closely, expression unreadable now—exhausted, maybe. Or bracing for impact.
Harrison sighs, finally tucking his phone away and crossing his arms. “My guys finally got a clean trace on the elevator audio.”
I straighten. “And?”
“It didn’t come from our system.”
Jack frowns. “You sure?”
“We triple-checked. VT’s camera feeds were buggy that night, remember? Surveillance was already spotty because of the building’s rolling grid issues. Our internal footage wasn’t usable.”
“So then…?”
“It came from a third-party device. Something planted in the elevator. Battery-powered. Low-range transmission. No cloud-based backup.”
“A bug?” I ask.
He nods.
“Jesus,” Parker whispers.
“Someone planted it. Set it to record. Then pulled it after the fact and leaked the clip in just the right window to make it look like a VT internal failure. All signs point to Icon PR.”
My stomach tightens. “You’re certain.”
“Enough to build a case. We’ve got IP traces, metadata routing through shell domains they’ve used before, and we matched time stamps on some of Vanessa’s past digital correspondence. Whoever leaked it used her access channels. Her schedule. Her team.”
I smile. It’s slow. Sharp. A little too wide. “This is actionable.”
Jack’s eyes light up. “We can bury them.”
Parker’s voice cuts in, soft but steady. “You’re sure it was Vanessa?”
Harrison glances at her. “No. But I’m sure it was Icon and her logins.”
“She’s not their only knife,” I say. “Just the one that used to be aimed at me.”
“And now?” Parker asks. I look at her. Now they aimed at her. At all of us. And missed. But not for lack of trying.
“I’ve been waiting for something like this,” I say, pacing a little. “They’ve been circling our client base for months. Spinning subtle attacks, poisoning vendor relationships, nudging donors. We couldn’t hit back without proof.”
“And now we have it,” Jack says.
“We do.” I stop pacing. Look at Harrison. He’s not smiling. Which is the part that catches me. He should be. “What?”
He doesn’t answer. Just reaches into his inside jacket pocket and pulls out a folded printout. Black and white. Crisp. He holds it for a second, gulps, then passes it to me.
“Do I want to know what’s on this?”
“Hard to say.”
I unfold it and read the first line. Right there—at the top of the donor routing chart, listed as a silent financial backer to a shell investment firm linked to Icon PR’s operations fund—is a name I know too well.
Vivian Thatcher.
The page in my hand doesn’t tremble. I do.
Just slightly. A flicker in the fingers. A twitch in my jaw. The paper stays still, held tight between hands that have gripped thousand-dollar pens and stage microphones and steering wheels at 130 miles an hour—but never something like this.
At the top: Thatcher Holdings.
Underneath it, a cascade of shell corporations. Dummy entities. Private funds. All of them tied to a series of boutique investment portfolios designed for one thing. Silent influence. One of those portfolios feeds money directly into Icon PR’s strategic operating pool.
The same pool responsible for their “aggressive expansion tactics.” Their legal safety net. Their digital campaign infrastructure. The same pool involved with the bug in our elevator, if the routing is to be believed.
“Jesus Christ,” I breathe.
Jack steps behind me and reads over my shoulder. He exhales like he’s been punched.
Parker’s already sitting. She looks pale again, hand resting unconsciously on her stomach.
Harrison doesn’t move.
“You’re sure,” I say. My voice sounds low. Hollow. Not like mine.
He nods. “We triple-verified the routing.”
“When did you get this printout?”
He sighs. “Did you see a scruffy-looking guy in catering about ten minutes before Vanessa fell?”
“No.”
“That’s because my hackers are good at being invisible.”
I drag my fingers through my hair as I hold on to the last crumb of hope. “Could be a coincidence.”
“It’s not. Her financial manager signed off on the transfer last quarter. We pulled the authorization from the portfolio disclosures tied to her West Coast advisory team.”
Parker quietly says, “She funded the people trying to destroy her old company.”
“She paid for the leak,” Jack mutters.
“She paid to humiliate me ,” I say, even as I don’t believe it. I can’t. “This is too far, even for her. Your guys must be mistaken.”
Harrison locks eyes with me. “She engineered it. We need to do a sweep of the whole building. Especially our offices. It’s not a coincidence that we were bugged in that elevator at the exact right moment to create a scandal. She’s not going to leave something like this up to chance.”
“I know what you’re saying makes sense, but…” How am I supposed to live with this? Knowing my own mother is capable of doing this to me? To the people I care about?
“Chance is not in her vocabulary,” Jack says. “Your mother is nothing if not thorough. There will be more bugs. We should check our cars, our homes, everywhere we normally go.”
I fold the paper slowly, tightly, the edges creasing sharper than I intended. No one speaks. It’s too much. She’s too much. Because this is how my mother works. Not with loud fights or direct orders. With funding, silence, and curated chaos that keeps her at the top of the food chain.
I can’t wrap my brain around this. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, and I’m looking at the box. I know how the pieces fit together…but I can’t stand looking at the picture.
“She knew about Vanessa before the gala,” I murmur. “She invited her.”
Parker’s eyes meet mine. “You don’t think it was just Vanessa being Vanessa?”
“No.” I don’t want to say the words, but they come out anyway. “I think it was Vivian’s script. Vanessa was just the actress.”
Harrison crosses his arms again, heavy and solid like a boulder you can lean against. “We’re not done tracing everything. But there’s one thing I know for sure. Vivian’s financially tied to Icon PR. If she wasn’t our enemy before, we know damn sure she is now. Gavin, I’m sorry for this, but?—”
“Vivian Thatcher was an enemy long before we knew about Icon,” Jack says. “Now it’s up to us to clean up her mess.”